All chairs are certainly not made equal.

I just spent the night in a motel in eastern North Carolina. It was actually a very nice spacious room. The motel was only about 14 months old and that makes an incredible difference in the quality of your stay. New motels have not had enough time to get stinky from smoke or disinfectant or whatever stinks up a good motel room.

One thing I personally look for in a good room is a nice chair to sit in while working at my laptop or reading or watching the TV if that is what I end up doing while I’m there. The television is rather a last resort for me unless I can find a good baseball game or a specific show I enjoy. I hate to find myself trolling with the remote. Once I start that bullshit, it can go on forever before someone comes along and slaps me on the side of the head in order to get me to snap out of it. TV is a bit like ice cream for me. I find it all too easy to start and somewhat difficult to stop. That’s why I usually sit and talk to the set when it’s on. It helps me keep the whole thing in perspective if I can point out the lies and deceptions that are going on while I watch. Unfortunately it makes me no friends with my family if they are trying to watch something while this little game is going on.

I don’t like to use the stuffed comfy chairs that are located in most hotel rooms. Most of them are way too soft for my liking and while it is easy to get into them, a person of my substantial body frame finds them rather difficult to leave. When I first eye a chair in any given new situation, whether it is a motel room or a friend’s home, I usually size up the furniture with the dismount in mind. In other words, how much effort is it going to be to get out of the damned thing?

That’s why I usually avoid soft chairs or sofas. The best bet for me is usually a straight back dining room chair or even a solid folding chair. They are easier on my back and they provide the support I crave for long spells of TV or computer time.

The chair that was pushed up against the desk in the motel room I was in made me wary from the start.

First of all, it did not look very substantial at all. It was an office type chair with wheels to roll around on (something that is usually quite pleasant for me) but there was this weird kind of pattern of holes in the back that looked faintly old-fashioned and somewhat macabre in nature. It looked almost evil. The kind of chair that invites you in when you know you should stay away and then somehow or other traps you. A black widow chair, if you will.

“Come, sit down relax…Hahahahahahahaha!!!!!!!!!!!!

I may let my imagination run wild sometimes but I had to sit somewhere and when I get all of my stuff in a motel room the first thing I want to do is get my laptop set up and check my email. I guess I’m just that kind of 21^st Century (check my math Randolph) kind of guy. So I sat in this suspicious chair and proceeded to boot up said computer.

If there is anywhere in this or my previous posts where I indicated that I was a really sharp, intelligent sort of person I must have been drinking when I wrote it, because it just is not so. Upon placing myself in the arms of this new chair and sitting at the desk with my laptop I was disturbed by the height of the chair. I felt like an orphan at the community table waiting for my portion of porridge. The height of the table came up to the top of my stomach just below my chest and I thought all of the blood would drain out of my arms before the afternoon was over.

I’m embarrassed to say how often a minor difficulty will cause me to adjust my actions and sometimes my thinking rather than serve as the impetus to make me fix or correct a problem. If my windshield wipers stop working I tend to do things like stick my arm out of the window in the rain and wipe away the water rather than go to a service station and get the proper repair done. I could name way too many other examples of such backward thinking but I think you get my drift.

It was only on my second trip to the computer, and therefore the chair, that I realized there was a lever on the side of it that an intelligent person could use to raise and lower the height of this sitting apparatus. Duh! OK. I can still learn things. At the proper height I came to have a new respect for this marvelous and intriguing piece of furniture.

My wife is a bit more supple and flexible, in many respects, than I am. She can use the laptop that she is normally connected too (meaning most waking hours) while sitting on the motel bed. When I felt as though I was caught up with the world of CNN, Major League Baseball, my email and twitter, I turned to her and we began to chat about our day and the things we had to do tomorrow. Lucky is the man who can talk with his wife. Not that we never disagree, but I still find her conversation truly interesting.

While I sat in the chair, I leaned back and stretched my feet out in front of me. I discovered my own personal angle of repose and laced my hands together behind my head. After a few minutes I rose to perform some task. I really don’t remember what, but the point is I got up from the chair and walked around the room. Maybe I was pulling down the covers and looking for a mint that may or may not have been placed on my pillow. (It was not there, this was not THAT good of a motel). Later when I returned to the chair I noticed that I had inadvertently rolled the arm of the chair under the handle of the drawer in the center of the table where my laptop was. When I stood up the chair rose beneath me and the arm caught on the handle and lifted the table up in the air like a jack had been placed under it. I thought that was kind of funny. This chair was still baffling me.

My experiences with this chair had already taught me many things but it was not over yet.

It was not until the next morning that I discovered another unique characteristic of this fine piece of office furniture.

Since I have a large frame, (No laughs here please), I look for more than substance or support when choosing a chair. I also have to be vigilant about the arms. In an ideal world most of the chairs I encounter would not have arms at all. After all, I am capable of resting them on a table either in front of me or to my side and if worse comes to worse I can fold them across my stomach. It’s true, I really can.

In a restaurant I usually try to be seated at a table rather than a booth but unless the chair has no arms or is fairly wide, it can be a problem sitting in it comfortably. Usually, if the chair does not fit this description, I will find myself perching on the front of it. It makes it easier to leave and I feel safer. One never knows when the place may catch fire and you will have to depart quickly.

The devil chair, or as I was beginning to feel about it, the darned good chair had arms and while that were not spaced any too far apart, they did not seem to present a real problem. But as I stated earlier, on the next day I discovered a rather cool characteristic of the chair that I had not known about earlier. The arms moved. Tadaaah!

Yes, you could push the arms and they swiveled on some sort of hinge on the back of them that caused you to be able to swing them out for more comfort. At least more comfort for us more traditionally built men. You know, the men who built this country; the real men. Oh well, be that as it may, I guess I should feel lucky that I can be entertained and educated by such a simple piece of work. Where would we be without comfortable chairs?

The Chair in Question

I remember an old episode of the Andy Griffith Show where Andy and Barney are singing this old sold that my parents sang when I was a kid. The title of the song was The Vacant Chair.

The lyrics went something like this

“We will meet, but we will miss him, there will be one vacant chair”

I looked it up on Google, you know, where we find out everything we want to know. If you’d like to read the lyrics and hear what the melody sounds like check out this link.

http://www.contemplator.com/america/vchair.html

One of my children (very funny kids have I) one time changed the words to fit the more appropriate situation in the event of my passing.

“We will meet, but we will miss him, there will be one vacant love-seat”

Funny children I raised. Yes, I am a lucky guy.

Prissy Polly's Restaurant in Kernersville, NC

Barbeque is a word of many meanings. In some places it is considered a verb and in others a noun. For the sake of simplicity I will be referring to it here in the latter sense.

Barbecue can be made of pork or beef and I suppose just about anything else in the way of meat. I don’t really know if there is such a thing as barbecue made from fish, but I would not be all that surprised if someone told me there was.

I have enjoyed barbeque that was made from beef but after living twenty years in North Carolina I tend to think of it as pig. Some may call it pork but I think we should be honest about what we are eating here.

Recently the pig itself has been suffering from a bit of negative publicity. I am referring to the most recent swine flu outbreak. I pray that this outbreak will be contained and that no more lives will be lost. But I do love to eat the pig.

Having just returned to North Carolina after a leave of almost four years I was glad to find myself rolling along I-40 and headed in the direction of Kernersville, NC as the lunch hour was approaching. Kernersville is the small town between Greensboro and Winston-Salem that has my favorite barbecue in the world and with that in mind I call the lunch hour any time they are open and I am nearby.

There is a major divide in terms of barbecue in North Carolina that is just as distinct and almost as fought over as the Civil War was some 150 years ago. On the eastern side of the state they slow cook their pig and serve it with a vinegar sauce that has hot pepper flakes in it and some brown sugar. In the western side of the state they use a more traditional tomato based sauce. This is the sauce that most resembles what is sold in supermarkets like KC Masterpiece or any one of a number of name brand commercially produced sauces. Most people prefer one over the other and it has been known to divide families. The dividing line in the state between these competing sauces is generally regarded as Lexington, NC and the western sauce is sometimes referred to as Lexington barbecue. Most restaurants sell one or the other and that is one of the reasons I really like Prissy Polly’s in Kernersville. They serve them both. The live together side by side in the same building and they act as a guide to the whole human race. There is no reason we can’t all coexist as well as these two different, yet equal, sauces do at this fine dining establishment.

The Large Barbecue Plate

Today I got a chance to eat at Prissy Polly’s for the first time in over four years and what a treat it was. I ordered the large barbecue plate with the eastern sauce. My wife chose a western style barbecue sandwich. We too are different but equal.

I love that stuff but that is far from the only reason to stop and dine at Prissy Polly’s.

You would think that beans are a side dish that would be hard to ruin and yet I cannot tell you how many times I have eaten in a lunch room or diner and been disappointed by my bean experience. They are usually just so bland and simple. It is a shame because they are not all that difficult to make really well. I know this because I have made beans many times and feel very confident in my recipe. Prissy Polly does them right.

The other great dish they do that goes so well with the barbecue is their collard greens. Once again, they are not all that difficult to make but somehow they are often made very bland and tasteless. Prissy Polly does them right.

I will miss the west coast and I hope I return again but I am going to enjoy myself living in the land of my favorite barbecue. I am back in NC. The pork industry should consider itself forewarned.

We finished our trek yesterday and are now staying with my daughter and her fiancée in Raleigh, NC. It is great to have a break from motel rooms and road food. It is fantastic to see our children and other relatives who are living in the Old North State. We were on the road for nine days and traveled a total of 3684 miles. I totaled our expenses at $1590.23. The quote to ship the car was over $1700.00 and we would have had to buy airline tickets to move ourselves. The trade off in time was more than worth it in our eyes because we will have the memories for the rest of our lives. To those of you who have followed the trip, thanks. To those friends we left behind, we look forward to the time when we see you all again.

The Rose Garden Restaurant

I’ve already made it clear that outside of their blatant lack of good pie, we love the Cracker Barrel. I am going to try to not talk about them anymore because they are not really what I like to look for when I am searching out great food in new places.

When you get a burger at McDonald’s you can be sure that it will always be as good as the last one you ate no matter where that was. They are consistently the same. Never any worse and of course, never any better. No surprises. The Cracker Barrel is even more so. We know the food will be of a certain level and that it will be consistent. In fact, Cracker Barrel carries it to an even higher level of consistency because the stores are all laid out exactly alike. I am sure that I could enter any Cracker Barrel blindfolded and find my way to a table to sit with no help.

But when you are trying to find new exciting meals, you have to move off of the beaten path and take a chance.  In order to move forward in almost any endeavor you have to take a chance and taking a chance means that occasionally you fail. Or in the case of new food finds occasionally you get some bad stuff. That’s life.

I made a new friend today on the road and that alone is something to be happy about.

Mr. J.T. Askew

We pulled into the very small town of Silver Point, Tennessee today to fill up the van and see if we could find some lunch. As I was filling the tank I saw an older gentleman park his car and head into the convenience store. What caught my eye was the license plate on the front of his vehicle that said “The Mayor”. He came back out of the building after I was finished at the pumps to I approached him and said, “Sir, excuse me sir”.

When he looked up at me I asked him if he was the mayor. He laughed and said yes. He said it was a small town and that people jokingly referred to him as the mayor.

“They gave me this license plate because they call me that”.

He then proceeded to tell me about being in the navy during World War II and how he moved quickly up through the ranks because of some special schooling he had. I told him where I had come from and where I was going and pointed to my wife in the car to show him we were traveling together. We talked a little longer and then I told him why I had stopped him.

I said that I figured since he was the mayor that he would probably be able to tell me if the restaurant right next to the gas station served good food.

He smiled and said the he ate there.

That was good enough for me.

When we entered the Rose Garden Restaurant we found a fairly small room with a lot of tables and just a few people eating. Behind the counter however, we saw that there were three women sitting at a separate table eating. It was lunch time for the employees as well as us. One of the lades told us to seat ourselves and then she grabbed some menus and came over and after pointing out the specials on the chalk board, withdrew to fill our unsweetened ice tea orders.

The nice lades of the Rose Garden Restaurant

In the south, and some other areas of the country I’m sure, there is a dinner or lunch that is offered for sale in many small diners or in some cases trailers, small houses or open fields called “A meat and three”.

A meat and three is a meal that comes with a meat dish and your choice of three vegetables. Sometimes you can choose a meat from a list like roast beef, fried chicken or fish. And the list of vegetables you choose from may be anywhere from three or four up to ten or more.

The specials at the Rose Garden included a choice of roast beef with gravy or a boneless chicken breast and three vegetables from a list that included fried okra, pinto beans, mashed potatoes, corn, baked apple or slaw.

A Meat and Three

I had the roast beef with the okra, pinto beans and mashed potatoes and my wife decided to order from the menu and got a BLT with some chips.

While we were waiting for our order the place started to really fill up. Most of the folks seemed local and some of them having obviously been there before ordered dessert first which the ladies put aside for them. I guess they knew that you needed to reserve your pie or cake if you wanted to make sure to get some.

Any dining experience is composed of many parts. The food is important, but there is much more to your experience good or bad, then just the food.

These ladies were about as nice as people serving you can be. They wore smiles and they thank you’d and please’d you as well as anyone could. They were right nice, as they say in the south. More or better attention could not have been paid to us. I guess you can see where I’m going with this.

I do not do professional reviews of restaurants. I just write down my personal opinions for whatever they are worth and that may well be nothing.

My meat and three was not really anything to write home about, and yet, here I am doing just that.

Did I mention just how nice those ladies were?

The roast beef with gravy was actually some sort of rather poor roast beef sandwich type meat and the gravy came from a can or I don’t know anything at all about food. The okra was reheated in a microwave and dry and hard. The mashed potatoes were instant and the corn muffin that came with it all was reheated and hard. However, the pinto beans were pretty darn good. I should also mention that my wife liked her sandwich.

Understand this, I ate it all. It was not the worst lunch I ever had by many miles. It just was not homemade and it was just not anything special at all.

When I see a display case with pie in it I smile. I think I have made it clear in earlier posts just how I feel about pie.

The Pie Cabinet

They had several kinds for sale and after narrowing it down to either cherry or pecan I asked the nice lady if she would just pick one for me. I like to do that in a restaurant. Usually the people who work in the restaurant are pretty knowledgeable about what is really good and what is not so good. She brought me the pecan and my wife had the pound cake.

I would like to state here that the pie saved the day and the whole lunch was redeemed but I see no reason to lie. The pie had a crust that tasted like cardboard and I am sure that it had not been made by anyone who was much different from Mrs. Smith. Oh well. The ladies were real nice.

We greatly enjoyed the meal. The atmosphere was great and the folks in the place were a joy to be around. The meal was not terrible. It was just not homemade and there was absolutely nothing spectacular about it. I am glad we went there. We had a great time and a lot of fun. You have to stick your neck out once in a while and go for something different. You need to sample the unknown. You will never find that in a McDonalds or a Cracker Barrel. Take a chance and look for the spectacular.

P.S. We rolled across Tennessee today listening to good old Hank Williams.